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Untuk anak-anak gadis kami / To our little girls

We know her as Yuyun. A fourteen year old teenage girl who was killed and whose body was disposed to the cliff after being raped by fourteen men. Not many tells the bitterness of growing up as a teenage girl in this country.

Every time a rape case happened, everyone eyed wrongfully to the girls. It is our fault to leave the house alone. It is our fault to dress in an inappropriate clothes (even though I still haven’t fully understood what is inappropriate with school uniform).

We grew up to see our body as something lewd, that always invite men to think erotically. We are not raised to understand that women are also creatures with free will to decide what and how we want to live our lives. If we are groomed to be a subject of shame for having sexually inviting bodies, then the boys are groomed to see their opposite sex’s bodies as something desirable.

In a case as what was experienced by Yuyun, it seems like everyone forgets what is the real root cause of this problem. All eyes on us, the girls. From the media to the judicial process. Minimalist dress, seducing behavior, to alcohol are at fault.

We are grown in a culture where the very nature of women are always under the men. Women are only accessories to their men. Feeble creatures in the patriarchal society. The overbearing pride from thinking that men are the only creature with the will and ability to dominate. They are high in a poison called testosterone.

Our parents choose to remain silent when we approach to tell them what happened to us. The feeling of embarrassment takes place for their tainted little girls. The law is not even helping us since we live in the patriarchic law.

No one remembers the importance of sex education. All porn films are banned, no adults is willing to explain the difference between the sexual intercourse where the women consent and act based on their will or they are under-age teenagers who were under drug influence.

I hope that Yuyun’s death will be able to remind us to start questioning the important questions about how men and women are, including their desires to be placed properly before the law and cultures in this country. That in principle, we all know that we still live in a destructive hypocrite society, with the behaviors that are strongly associated with sexism and biases toward unfair masculinity.

Yuyun, please forgive us for we haven’t been able to see what happened to you as a tragedy that needs to be settled. Instead of just another statistics of sexual violence towards our girls that we soon will forget in a day or two.